Tag: online marketing

It’s hard isn’t it?
Yes, I’m talking about establishing your brand online. As you have probably learned, you can’t just throw up a cool-looking website and then expect thousands of visitors to come flocking to it.
It doesn’t work that way. And it’s pretty frustrating, right? You’ve probably dabbled in social media. You may have even written a few blog posts.
But nobody comes to visit. And you’re probably about to lose your mind.
To add salt to the wound, you have probably seen many business owners make it look easy. How do they get so many visitors and subscribers?
Here’s reality: it’s not easy at all. Building a strong online presence takes a lot of time and hard work. But that’s not all. It also requires you to make sure you’re taking the right steps. After all, you don’t want to waste time working hard on something that isn’t going to get you anywhere, do you?

Online Branding Steps

1. Start Your Blog

If you have done any reading on online marketing, you’ve already learned why blogging is important for business owners. Blogs remain one of the most powerful tools for expanding your influence, building credibility, and getting more exposure for your business.
Businesses who blog earn tons more leads than those that don’t.
Here are some of the benefits of blogging:

It increases the likelihood that prospects will become paying clients.

Blogs are a great way to build your email list.

So why don’t more entrepreneurs blog? Well, one of the reasons is because they believe it’s too hard to build and maintain one.
But this doesn’t have to be the case. There are steps you can follow to establish a high-quality blog.

2. Start Creating Content

After you have chosen your platform and web host, and your blog is completely set up, you need to start creating content. This is the part you’ve been waiting for, right?
Not so fast.
Before you start writing content you need to have a plan. You don’t want to just start writing whatever you feel like writing. You need to know what type of content you need to write.
Fortunately, this isn’t too hard. You just need to ask yourself the following questions:

What type of information does my audience need? What questions are they asking?

What types of blog posts would work the best for my readers?

What have others in my industry written about? How can I take a unique approach?

Here’s the thing: you’re not just writing content for the sake of writing content. Each blog post you write needs to have one objective: to benefit your readers as much as possible.
People don’t read content that isn’t helpful. Chances are, if they came to your blog it’s because they believe you’re providing information that they need. You need to deliver the goods!

3. Create Your Social Media Strategy

Creating a blog is an important step, but it’s pretty much useless if nobody reads it, right? That’s where social media comes in.
Social media is the best way to promote your content and your business. It’s the tool you will use to attract visitors to your blog and your website. An effective social media strategy can get your website more exposure and enable you to interact with your audience.

4. Use The Right Social Media Platform

Before implementing a social media strategy, you need to know which platforms to use. Otherwise, you might be wasting a lot of time posting on platforms that your audience doesn’t use.
The key is to find out which services your target market is using the most. You have to understand the demographics that make up your audience. Fortunately, you may already know this if you’re familiar with your industry.

5. Social Media Marketing Is About Being Helpful

Just like writing content, your main objective when using social media should be to help as many people as you can. It’s not about just promoting your products and services. Social media should be used to share your content and engage with your prospective clients.
Now, I’m not saying that you should never use social media to promote your products and services. It’s a great way to create awareness of what your business offers. However, you don’t want to overdo it.
One effective method for sharing on social media is to use the 30/60/10 rule. Here’s how this works:

30 percent of your social media posts should be your own content.

60 percent should be curated posts of other people’s content.

10 percent should be posts that promote your products or services.

You don’t have to stick hard and fast to that ratio. You might find that tweaking it a bit will work better for your business. Don’t be afraid to experiment. Find out what’s most effective for you.

6. Give A Compelling Offer

How many times have you visited a website and been offered something cool for free? No doubt you’ve probably downloaded at least a few ebooks, checklists, and other types of content from sites that had valuable information to share.
Chances are, you only had to type in your email address, then download the goods, right?
So why does this work? Well it’s a little thing called the reciprocity principle. It simply means that if you give something valuable to another person, they will be more willing to give you something that you want.
In order to get subscribers, you have to offer something valuable. You can’t expect your visitors to give you their highly-prized email address if they’re not going to get anything out of it.
The great thing about this is that it’s not too difficult. You just have to think of what types of information would be the most valuable to your visitors.
Here are a few examples of free offers you can give to your readers:

Ebooks

Cheat sheets

Checklists

White papers

A free consultation

A video teaching

Not too hard right? But here’s the key: it has to be something that goes deeper than the value you’re already providing on your blog. You have to give them a reason to want it.

7. Engage With Your Audience

After you have gained permission to contact your visitors, you need to engage with them. This is where you will develop your email marketing campaigns.
When email your list, you don’t want to send only promotional materials. Similar to social media campaigns, email marketing should be used to provide value to your readers. Otherwise, they will stop opening your emails. They may even unsubscribe.
You don’t want that, right?
Figure out ways you can give your readers more of what they want: helpful information. Here are some suggestions:

Send updates on your latest blog posts.

Give content that only your email list gets to see.

Ask for some feedback from your audience. It’s a great way to gain a deeper understanding of your subscribers.

Give your readers a behind the scenes look at what your business is doing.

When you’re focused on providing more value with your email marketing, your readers will be more likely to spend their money with you. You don’t want to send a ton of sales emails if you’re not also providing a benefit to your readers.

Conclusion

Building an online footprint isn’t easy. It does take time. You will need to work hard to promote your website and build a healthy following. Most businesses don’t get instant results.
But if you’re consistent, you will be able to build an engaged audience. It does require perseverance, but when you finally start getting more clients, the hard work will pay off.

Online marketing is an essential part of your automotive marketing, and the online world is constantly changing.

You need to stay up to date, and connect with your customers over multiple modes of communication in order to be effective. We have some tips to help you out.

1. Connect Effectively with Online Leads

Many dealerships do not know how to reach out to online leads that visit their website or their social media pages. In order to draw in online visitors, place calls to action and signup forms on multiple pages of your website and on your Twitter and Facebook pages. Signup forms should allow visitors to subscribe to your marketing emails or text messages. Calls to action can encourage customers to download any inbound marketing resources that you offer, such as a car buying guide, or to click for a special promotional offer.

2. Keep your Social Media Pages Up to Date

Don’t try to be on every social media site online. Instead, focus on distributing quality content on a few of the most popular sites, such as Facebook. If your social media pages are stagnant, visitors will think your auto business is lazy or doesn’t care about its customers. An automated marketing solution can help you keep your pages current, without you having to manually update it all the time. Create posts and tweets in advance and schedule them to post over time.

3. Provide Useful Auto Dealership Marketing Resources

In order to truly engage your online customers, you need to provide valuable, relevant resources. These can include informative emails, text message coupons, auto maintenance tips, industry news, whitepapers and so on. These resources help to establish your auto dealership marketing as an automotive authority and create ongoing interest in your customers.

4. Use Automated Marketing to Personalize Marketing Campaigns

An automated marketing solution can be used to make your marketing campaigns highly personalized for each of your customers. A customer profile is created which stores customer preferences, vehicle history, purchase and auto maintenance history and individual customer dates. This information is used to send personalized promotional messages and maintenance reminders at exactly the right time. Personalized campaigns help to drive business back to your dealership and boost customer satisfaction.

5. Respond to Online Feedback Promptly

Just as you would quickly follow up with an in-person customer complaint or other feedback, you must also follow up with any online feedback. If a customer posts a comment on your Facebook or Twitter page, reply in a friendly and professional manner. Don’t ever start an argument with a customer on social media or it will come back to haunt you, and can even seriously damage your auto dealership reputation.

6. Gather Feedback Easily through Surveys

One of the most important aspects of any type of marketing, is to continually analyze your campaigns and see how they can be improved. Gaining useful customer feedback through online surveys is a simple way to learn what your customers want. Try to make survey questions simple and straightforward so your customers will be able to answer them clearly. Surveys can be sent out to customers after they visit the dealership in order to gauge their opinions about the service. Survey distribution and the gathering of information can be made much easier and more efficient with an automated survey tool.

7. Offer Special Marketing Promotions

Promotions and contests are very effective ways to engage customers. Many customers will go to your dealership over a competitor dealer if you have a special promotion going on. You can easily promote your contests, coupons and auto sales on your website and on your social media pages. Promotions are a great way to draw new and repeat business to your auto dealership.

8. Interact with Your Customers Online

This tactic is an excellent way of connecting with your customers, and works as a form of indirect marketing. Online communication, especially social media, is all about two way interaction between businesses and their customers. Pose questions, such as “What is your favorite song to listen to in the car?” Join conversations on Twitter by using hashtags (relevant keywords or phrases with the # sign in front of them) and contribute useful auto information. Communicating actively with your customers online shows that your auto dealership is active and engaged with its customers, and that you value your customers’ opinions.

9. Integrate Your Marketing Efforts

Your online marketing campaigns should go hand in hand in order to make the most of your budget and your efforts. Post signup forms on your website and social media pages that encourage visitors to subscribe to your email marketing newsletters and text message campaigns. Your email marketing newsletters should have social sharing and social following buttons that allow subscribers to easily share your content with a wider audience. Whenever you send out marketing messages, think about how you can integrate that message in with your other marketing efforts.

10. Create Videos

Videos are some of the most engaging things you can put on your website and social media pages. They are engaging, informative and interesting to your auto customers. Your auto videos can advertise your newest vehicles or special sales you are having, or they can be all about automotive tips and can provide your customers with information they can really use. Videos can also be easily shared so more people see them and you will bring in new business for your dealership.

The 14 top rated digital marketing techniques for 2017 according to Smart Insights readers

In this article, I’ll take an in-depth look at what I see as the most significant trends in digital marketing for the year ahead. But, it’s not only my view, since I have ‘crowdsourced’ the importance of the different trends rated by the popularity of each trend.

For all members of Smart Insights, we also have a more detailed free download of the marketing megatrends for 2017, which are 9 digital marketing and martech megatrends will help give you an edge in 2017. In the download we discuss machine learning and artificial intelligence, which for me is the biggest trend in marketing right now. Machine learning techniques apply across many of the techniques we discuss in this post including Big Data, Marketing Automation, Organic Search and Social media marketing. If you want to know more about the defition of digital marketing before starting on trends, see our post on What is Digital Marketing ?

To get our readers’ views on the most important trends at a top-level, we asked Smart Insights readers to give their opinion on the most important trends. We asked:

“Select one marketing activity that you think will give your business the biggest incremental uplift in leads and sales in 2017 (or your clients if you work for an agency or as a consultant)”.

Thanks if you shared your opinion, we had 2,352 responses from marketers around the world! Here are the results for 2017:

While this doesn’t have a controlled sample of our free research reports like Managing Digital Marketing, it does canvas opinion widely. Note that these trends aren’t necessarily the most important channel by volume of leads or sales, rather it is the tactic which will give the biggest increase in the year ahead, so it shows what is becoming more important. By asking for just one tactic, this helps shows the top 3, 5 or 10 top-level trends.

To help the decision on which technique to choose, we expanded upon the short labels you see in the graph to help scope the response more carefully. For example, ‘Big Data’ is a nebulous term, but when we expanded the definition to include insight and predictive analytics, it shows the value of the specific marketing techniques for Big Data and this help explains why this is in position number two. Â Here is the full listing of digital marketing techniques:

In our Digital Channel Essentials Toolkits within our members’ area and our Digital Marketing Skills report we simplify digital marketing down to just 8 key techniques which are essential for businesses to manage today AND for individual marketers to develop skills. This visual shows the core techniques which will drive more leads and sales for you, but within some sectors, techniques like using AI, IoT, Wearables will be more important.

The Top 14 marketing techniques in 2017?

Let’s now drill down into the key tactics and marketing technology within each of these tactics which will be important in 2017.

1. Content marketing trends

Content marketing has been in the top 3 for the last 3 years we have run this post, so we focus a lot on how to create an integrated content marketing strategy through advice in our content marketing toolkit.

Our research with HubSpot, illustrated in the Competing on Content infographic, shows that more businesses are now using a strategic approach (40%), so this is a trend we can expect to see continuing in 2017. We can also expect that there will be more focus on Measuring Content Marketing ROI as the cost and competition within content marketing increases.

At a practical level, Martech Guru Scott Brinker has talked about the 4th Wave of Content Marketing and I’m seeing more and more examples of interactive marketing apps – like our capability graders and also personalisation tools recommending content. Read his article, introducing it, a great read and you can check out the ionInteractive examples of interactive content marketing.

2. Big Data

The 3Vs of Big Data show why this is a key trend selected by many, who have experienced the increase in volume, real-time data and data formats in their business and want to exploit the value to increase sales through personalisation on websites and through email marketing through predictive analytics – a topic we have covered many times on our blog. It’s also closely tied into machine learning where Big Data is mined to identify propensity to convert given different customer characteristics and behaviour.

Image original source from Diya Soubra in a Data Science blog – The 3Vs that define Big Data

Like content marketing, marketing automation has been in the top 3 for the last 5Â years we have asked this question. Many businesses still have potential for improving their automation as our research on the State of Marketing Automation shows.

To help with this knowledge gap, I think I have given more webinars and talks on Marketing Automation than on any other topic in 2016. The most common questions at the end are ‘where do we start’ and ‘how do we get to the next level’. These questions are answered in our Email marketing and marketing automation toolkit which includes a free interactive capability review to score your use of email marketing automation. As businesses progress up the learning curve I expect more businesses to be putting lead scoring in place, or refining it and learning the best places on the journey to feature content through predictive analytics.

4. Mobile marketing (Mobile advertising, site development and apps)

Mobile was in the top 3 three years ago, but as more companies have adopted mobile responsive web design and email templates they have seen less need to focus on it, or at least there are fewer opportunities for growth.

However, research shows that retail conversion rates are significantly lower on smartphone, so there is work to be done for many businesses to optimise conversion on mobile, although they will likely always stay lower than desktop.

Mobile also has a large impact on search marketing as Google vigorously follows its mobile first mantra. To me, it’s a somewhat misleading mantra, since the reality is that many web users are still using desktop, laptop and tablet devices and there is a danger with mobile responsive designs that conversion on higher resolution screens may fall if mobile optimised. Instead, leading companies are looking at adaptive mobile design approaches which have the benefit of serving more relevant, contextual content and CTAs for users and reducing load times.

‘Mobile first’ is also misleading if we look at the overall customer journey since often different devices may be involved at different points. So a better vision for mobile strategy is treating it as part of a multiplatform or multichannel strategy. As this data from comScore highlighted in our mobile marketing statistics research shows, the multiplatform ribbons for all countries are much broader than users who are mobile only or desktop only.

5. Social media marketing including Social CRM and Social Customer Care

When I meet marketers at events and training I find there is still huge interest in social media, thanks to its reach and options to engage audiences and encourage advocacy or ‘social media amplification’ to give it the full treatment.

Our social media research statistics summary shows continued growth in social media usage overall, but with reduced popularity of some social networks in some countries. For example Twitter and Facebook are in decline or plateauing in many western markets while Snapchat, Instagram and Pinterest are still growing in usage.

Trends in social media marketing are often controlled by the efforts of the social networks to monetise and this has seen Facebook and Instagram, in particular make changes such that businesses now need to ‘pay to play’ to get the reach needed to have an impact. They have continued to innovate in their targeting and remarketing options. Jason DeMeyers has these interesting views on social media trends for 2017.

6. Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) / improving website experiences

This is the technique I selected a year ago as the way Smart Insights would see the most growth from in the year ahead. It’s higher in popularity than previous years, but I still wonder whether many businesses are missing out on a more data-driven approach to increase leads and sales from their websites.

I saw this chart of the volume of structured tests presented by a major multichannel retailer who wanted to scale the number of tests they were running. It a great way to show the need to test extensively since only a third have a positive test. It also shows how competitors may be getting ahead if they are testing more extensively.

7. Internet of Things (IoT) marketing applications

IoT is one of the most important marketing technology applications of the last 2-3 years, but it is of most relevance to devices makers and retailers, so it is relatively high-up in this ranking of priorities.

There are expected to be 75 billion connected devices by 2020, meaning there will be ten times as many devices able to talk to one another as there will be people on the planet! The implications are huge and far ranging. All this sharing of data will transform the way we live our lives.

Our article covering opportunities and examples of marketing applications of the Internet of Things has this useful summary of alternative applications:

8. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO or organic search)

Mobile marketing SEO techniques will be particularly important in 2017 with Google’s recent announcements about the mobile index and AMP. We have seen huge increases in AMP smartphone traffic since September 2016 when Google rolled AMPs out beyond Google News. AMPs are targeted at publishers, but should be considered by businesses with an active blog too in my opinion.

We have been covering these announcements and improvements in our other alert posts:

14. Partnerships including affiliate and co-marketing

Other trends

This is an interesting category since readers can tell us what we’re missing. Suggestions here include:

Account Based Marketing (ABM) – relevant for B2B marketers targeting large accounts we have a new guide in our B2B toolkit on this early in the new year.

Digital OOH (Out-of-home) – A surprising one for the number one technique

Employee advocacy and feedback – interesting to see the internal marketing perspective – again surprising to see as the main growth point

Machine Learning – as mentioned at the top of the article

Omnichannel and multichannel attribution – both good for reminding us that it is the way that these channels work together to support each other that is often most important – the reason why many members are looking for advice on an integrated marketing strategy.

Real estate developers across the globe have started spending huge funds in Digital Marketing.

Following is an account of the most important guidelines on how to approach this new age mantra if you are new to digital marketing as a Real Estate Developer.

1. Blindly Investing in Digital marketing without understanding the nature of this marketing channel is a sin

You invest in a marketing channel in order to achieve some business goals, and as a Real Estate Developer it is mostly generating interest in your project and furnishing qualified leads for your sales team to convert.
Before jumping in the bandwagon of developers who are employing digital marketing as a channel for achieving business goals always question, as to what is the purpose of digital marketing for you, is it just lead generation? or awareness about your project? Maybe a combination of both. If it’s just lead generation you might consider spending more on real estate portals (Housing, 99acres or Magicbricks) which would probably give you abundant of leads to work with, instead of spending hefty amount on your own digital campaigns.
Investing too much on digital campaigns just because every other Real Estate Developer is doing it would just lead to inflation in your overheads without effective outcomes.

As a developer you understand that the project that you are developing is targeted towards a specific customer, the project is either budget, mid, premium or ultra-luxury segment. All this segment projects attract attention from different sects of the population(Niche) having different expectations.

While it goes without saying that a research on this preference patterns for your project, in order to find your Niche, is crucial for all your marketing efforts to be effective, it is also important that documentation of this preference patterns, usually done by creating buyer personas, is made available before stepping into digital marketing campaigns. In absence of such documentation the marketing efforts would be direction less. Just publishing a lot of content on all digital channels would not give you the benefits that you are looking for, concentrate on your customers and not the channels.

3. Deciding between the option of employing a Digital Marketing department or an Agency

Whether to form a Digital Marketing department of your own or outsourcing your Digital Marketing initiatives to an agency requires a lot of considerations like your budget, urgency, availability of expertise within organization etc. Budget, according to me is major most concern and a deciding factor in finalizing this decision.
If you employ a department there are a lot of advantages that you hold. Being an internal part of the company it will be in-line with your ideologies and objectives, a strong sense of urgency and awareness about the expectations is there, and most of all there would not be a gap in communication throughout the project marketing and sales campaign. There are a lot of benefits apart from the discussed points as well, but these benefits have to be extracted to the best.
In case you decide to go with an external agency for your digital marketing campaigns you should consider the points mentioned in the next sub heading.

4. Be cautious about hiring a Digital Marketing agency

Outsourcing your Digital marketing campaigns to a digital marketing agency is a good Idea considering the fact that it doesn’t require you to spend huge funds on the resources required to effectively create and manage digital assets. Digital Marketing agencies have the expertise and resources which are required to serve your objective and the experience of handling and executing many projects. But be aware, hiring an agency without giving a serious thought on the implications of hiring a bad one will be the worst mistake you’d ever want to make. Ask the representative of the agency if they’ve handled any Real Estate projects, Browse and look through the websites that they’ve worked on, you might also consider giving a call to the accounts that are already with the Agency for feedback, take an opinion from a trustworthy source who knows about the nuances of digital marketing to know that the Agency is not making use of unethical practices (for example: Using your website to divert the traffic or leads to other beneficiaries of the Agency).

5. Agreeing on SMART goals

Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time bound Goals are to be agreed upon between you and your digital marketing department/agency. As a Real Estate developer you can take this as an example, Goal : generating 250 leads from website in a month for the units in your project. If you take another look at the goal that we have set you will be able to figure out that it is SMART.
In the case where the goal is not achieved within the stipulated time you will always be able to explore the reasons for it and asking what could be done to achieve it, giving you the further course of actions to be taken.

You can’t turn blind eye towards your digital marketing campaigns once you are assured that the internal Digital Marketing department or an external Digital Marketing agency is working towards your digital campaigns, there are a lot of expectation from their side that are to be fulfilled. In case of internal department the department manager should be able to coordinate with all the other departments in the organization but in case of external agency you have to be on your toes to provide what the agency asks for and to have a constant communication so that there are no gaps in the execution and everything stays on track. for example, making CDR files (digital archive of photos and layouts for your project) readily available, providing pictures and information about the project’s construction stage, providing access to your social media pages for social updates and promptly handling any other requirements and queries from the Agency side.

7. Designing a website is just one step towards using Digital marketing as a marketing channel, so be patient!

So you’ve got your website designed according to the marketing plans? Great! But let’s be practical, it’s just the first step towards your digital marketing objectives. Don’t yet start expecting that your website will overnight turn into a lead generating machine. There will be lot many efforts which are to be taken to increase your presence online and for your audience to start visiting your website. Ask your Digital Marketing Manager or Agency what are the planned activities that will increase your presence, or to capture leads, what changes are to be made to achieve the set SMART goals etc.

8. Over representation of offerings to attract attention would do more bad than good

Always make sure that you are not displaying what you will not be able to deliver on your digital assets, whether it is your website or social media pages, because it will do more damage to you than good. Displaying prices that are way too lower than actual pricing, for example displaying 2BHK@25 Lac when the actual cost will go till 35Lac or mentioning specifications and amenities that are not present in the actual project ,this way you might receive a bit of higher attention from your audience by such publications over website and social media pages, but if during the physical site visit the customer comes to know that you are publishing fake details he might just publish a negative review on the net which might turn viral and you will face the brunt when below the link of your website a link appears showing negative remark about your project.

9. Keep yourself updated with basics of digital marketing

Well if you are reading this article and you are a developer, it means that you are taking steps to increase your awareness about Digital marketing. And I must appreciate that you are on the right track and will surely do great with your Digital marketing endeavors. Knowing the terms and advancements in digital marketing field will help you with the discussions that you have with the people that you have hired for digital marketing, set realistic goals, come up with great ideas and most of all stay aware of what is happening under your nose. You don’t have to indulge too much but a little effort would help you go a long way and render highly effective digital marketing campaigns.